Fear of Fear
Miedo al miedo
A student describes the difficulty of being present with unpleasant experience, the striving to reach pleasant states, and the anxiety that staying with discomfort will lead to collapse. The teacher and a fellow student explore the nature of fear, its habit of commandeering our actions, and the possibility of facing it in manageable increments.
Fear of Fear
A student describes the difficulty of being present with unpleasant experience, the striving to reach pleasant states, and the anxiety that staying with discomfort will lead to collapse. The teacher and a fellow student explore the nature of fear, its habit of commandeering our actions, and the possibility of facing it in manageable increments.
This was a very difficult meditation for me. And this relates to my question. Historically, most of what I'm doing on and off the cushion is just avoiding. The present moment is difficult for me, and I turn away: all kinds of distraction, food, movies, books, anything to bury myself in thought.
Lately, both on and off the cushion, I've been turning toward the present moment a lot more. Part of that is I found some pieces that were really nice and easy to pay attention to. But especially since last week, what's new for me is being present for difficult stuff.
When I am present for difficult things, I'm starting to see something. There's a lot of stuff I read over the years in dharma books about struggling with present experience, and I used to just roll my eyes at it. It seemed very abstract. But I'm starting to taste it now, across a bunch of different situations: I'm present, there's something I really don't like, and I'm just fighting with it. There's a restlessness and a need to turn away or get out of it.
A couple of things come up when I'm being present, whether the experience is good or bad. One is striving: a lot of striving to try to get to one of the nicer present moments. The other very common experience is this sense that I can't take this, that if I stick with this stuff I can't stand for longer and longer, I'm going to exhaust myself and collapse, and then everything will be miserable again. So I try to pay attention to that, but I don't really know what to do with those two experiences other than to just notice them as part of the present. I'm curious if you can comment on that.
Recognizing fear beneath the narrative
For sure. The last thing you talked about is fear. I'm not sure if that's obvious to you.
Yeah, it's fear, I guess. It has this particular narrative attached to it, but yeah, it feels really bad. You're right, it's fear. It's anxiety.
With fear, we need to first see that it's fear. Otherwise we get trapped in the narrative. We can get caught up in the narrative because it seems like we're doing the right thing. But if we are not aware that we are acting on fear, then fear will act through us. We basically give our will over to the commandment of fear.
Fear says, "If you do what I say, you won't have to feel me." That is how it functions through us psychically. If you follow the narrative of what fear is saying, then you'll get away from fear and everything is going to be okay.
You can see this in Christianity, which had a much bigger story about it: the temptation of Satan. But you can really minimize it to a functioning of the psyche, and you can also understand it in evolutionary and biological terms. A fear is triggered, and if you do what the fear says, things will be better, because fear is telling you where danger is and you want to be away from danger.
The problem is that we have evolved to a point where fear can get triggered for reasons that are not appropriate. We can be afraid of ghosts under the bed. There isn't an actual threat, but fear gets triggered because of conditioning. This has happened biologically: our bodies have become conditioned to react in a fearful way based on threats that aren't actually real in the present moment.
I wanted to lay out that map so we can talk about how to discern the right way to relate to fear.
The voice of fear and how it powers striving
First: know that it's fear. Otherwise, you're going down the path of just giving in to it. Anxiety is a form of fear, more in the background. Though it is not always mild or in the background. Anxiety can be a fear of fear.
That is exactly right for me. It is fear of fear a lot of the time. Sorry to interrupt, but you nailed it.
So the relationship to fear is: first, recognize what it is. You mentioned, for example, fear of fear. What I was saying earlier is that the voice of fear says, "If you do what I say, you won't feel me." The fear itself is uncomfortable, so we want to avoid it. We want to feel at peace. We want to feel that there is nothing wrong. And that powers the striving.
Discerning whether action is needed
One thing is to see what the actual danger is. You were saying, "If I don't do these things, maybe I'll fall back into a situation that was terrible, like in the past." Recognize that as anxiety, as fear, but don't immediately throw it out as unreal or as something to ignore. It's something to look at. Ask: am I wanting to do something right now that I'm not doing? It is always about what you most deeply want to be doing. Fear can be informative. There may be something we are not doing that we want to do, and so there is an action required.
At other times there isn't an action required. I'm simply avoiding something that is present right now. In that case, the work is to sit and feel and make room for what's happening.
That's very helpful. When you said it's fear, I thought, "Yeah, I guess I know that." But honestly, I think I don't really know it most of the time. I was feeling a little sheepish because it's sort of obvious when you say it.
And what was said about fear of fear was right on the money. I have high anxiety, so it's like fear of fear of fear. A lot of the avoidance comes from that. The distinction you're drawing is helpful: fear that says "put out the fire" or "don't get hit by this car" versus fear that just directs me away from what's right here. Most of my fear feels like the second kind. After avoiding for so long, being present is just unfamiliar to me.
It becomes a habit, right? An unconscious way of functioning.
Facing fear in increments
Question (from another student): I'm not sure what is sparking the anxiety. If it's actually meditating, maybe the teacher has more to say, but the way to do it is to face it in little bits. If you try to take off too big a chunk and face it all at once, sometimes you can get a flooding. If you face it in increments, in increasing increments, then it's usually manageable. That applies to sitting as well.
It very much applies. It could be sitting with something you want to sit with, but you keep distracting yourself. Just as was said: it's not about sitting with it for an hour necessarily. It could be, "I'm going to take one minute on the clock and just totally go into this, and then free myself from that effort after a minute." Experiment with what that is like. Then maybe later that day, try it again for two or three minutes.
Really explore. In some meditations I'm pointing more toward the sensations: what is the discomfort? Feel into it.
An acquired taste
One metaphor I like is to think of it as an acquired taste. I like that expression because we all know how, when we were young, there were things we didn't like that we later learned to like, and then we realized there was actually a lot more value in things that as children we thought were horrible.
An acquired taste happens where you discover value in something that was at first distasteful. In increments, you can learn to discover that there's a lot of value in feeling what you don't want to feel, in facing fear and letting fear move through you. Fear is usually about not feeling a certain pain. Once we are able to stay with fear, we will probably discover pain beneath it. It is a deepening, more and more, into allowing sensations that at first our whole conditioning tells us are a wrong direction.
At some point we come to this work, or for other reasons (addiction, dysfunction), we start to realize, "I need to figure out how to be with this." Then we discover the value, because things start to unravel and improve as we are able to sit and let our awareness touch and hold sensations like fear and pain that we don't want to hold.
What the fear is a fear of
Question (from another student): I think it really depends what the fear is a fear of. If what's happening when you sit down to meditate is that the self is dissolving and you're afraid of that dissolution, that's one thing, but it's also what you're wanting. It can also be that you're afraid of something because you're not doing something you should be doing: you have a gift that's unfulfilled, or something really essential in you is upset that you're not pursuing it, and you're not doing it because you're afraid. It can be a little bit specific.
Yeah, I think you're all pressing the right buttons. For me, fear is the big boogeyman because it has a habit of colonizing all aspects of my life. If I leave ten dishes in the sink, I'll come back and dread them the next day. I know everybody experiences dread and anxiety and fear, but for me it's like an invasive species that moves really fast. In all directions, if I move a little bit, I've got fear to clear out. And then I catch myself thinking, "Oh, I can do this later," but that's just the pattern repeating.
The opportunity in constant exposure to fear
I just want to say that this is also an opportunity you have. A lot of people don't have the conscious experience of meeting fear all the time. For them it's very suppressed, and they are functioning completely on automatic. Because you have this kind of constant exposure to anxiety and fear, there's an opportunity in it. I want to reframe it: there is a silver lining.
I never would have thought of it that way. My brothers and my dad might be in that category you described. It's a totally foreign idea to me. But thank you all very much.